In the last four days, my email has positively exploded with new subscriptions and likes and comments! Thank you guys so very much for finding my little corner and enjoying it enough to keep coming back. I feel the love and will keep up the good work. Tell your friends! This is going to be hopping place!
From the fingertips of Eugenia S
Filed under Personal Reflections
Very concise piece.
“Why can’t Jews get married on Shabbat?” a reader asked me recently. She and her fiancé had made a lot of expensive wedding arrangements, only to discover that very few rabbis will officiate on Shabbat (between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.) Now they are scrambling to find an officiant that will agree to officiate before sundown on a Saturday evening in the summertime.
TRADITION – At weddings, couples do many expensive and inconvenient things to honor tradition. Brides may pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for a dress they will only wear once. Couples mull over the “old, new, borrowed, and blue” custom. People who do not frequent synagogues or churches suddenly need a rabbi or priest. We do these and other things because on one of the biggest days of our lives, tradition matters. And it is Jewish tradition that weddings do not take place on the Sabbath and certain other days.
SHABBAT –…
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Filed under Personal Reflections
It is once again a Saturday morning. I am sitting on the couch in my PJs with a purring cat by my side. My boyfriend is up cleaning up the kitty’s mess. And I am not peaceful. I am counting down the mere hours at this point until Passover is over. I have a meal earmarked for the breaking of the proverbial fast, and that should make me happy. A delicious slice of tiramisu from my favorite amazing local Hungarian bakery. With that in my future I should be peaceful. But instead I am hungry. It had not ever dawned on me before how much forbidden stuff we have in the house. There was no chametz disposal because he doesn’t keep Passover and I thought I could keep my cool with it around!
But seriously I don’t know how I made it this far. All of our soups are noodle. We use frozen veggies and we were close to being out. All of our breakfast is bready, be it waffles or English muffins or toast! I had been subsisting on yogurt and macaroons for the week. We never have more than twenty minutes to make breakfast during the week so more is not option. As far as dinner goes, K is the chef in our family, I am a somewhat willing helper but cooking is not my thing. And yeah if he is not around like last night, I can’t make anything in the house – i.e. no soups, no microwaving anything, no snacks. I had some pickles, yogurt (yeah….) and kosher for passover coconut cake that was not very good. And I am sick to death of matzah. So I sit here not in peace feeling great pain for myself and how similar my experience is to my ancestors. After all they suffered in the desert too.
Thus spoken the first world problem. In all seriousness, I understand the depravation. It underlines a connection to ancestral memory, to a shared experience, to the core of my identity. And the return to the world of plenty will be ever sweeter because I chose myself to be without for eight days. Even if I can no longer bear the sight of matzah.
From the fingertips of Eugenia S
Filed under Personal Reflections
A lovely fellow blogger over at The Writes Stuff nominated me for a Liebster Award. Come check out her blog! it’s my first blogging award thing so I am really excited. It reminds me greatly of online surveys that we all used to send each other via email (don’t you all deny it, you know you did them) telling things about ourselves to our friends. So I get to re-live my twenties, yay! And talk about myself! Yay! So without further adieu, thank you for the nomination and here’s a bit about me! Hope you enjoy this!Filed under Personal Reflections
I will be selecting my next book because I still haven’t found the time to rewatch the movie for 2:1 seal I got planned for y’all. I am very excited about this book since I found it through my library. The pretty cover grabbed my attention so I glanced it over a bit and decided, yeah this sounds like a good one. It was only later that I discovered that it is very fitting to my blog so I get to share with everyone this awesome read (I hope) since i have already sent the e-book library loan back twice, third time is the charm! It referenced Jane Eyre on the book cover so that’s a reason 5 million and infinity why I have to read it.
From the fingertips of Eugenia S
Filed under Coming Next, Future Reviews, Personal Reflections
Chag Sameach everyone! Today is the very first full day of Passover. As I’ve said before, I consider myself a more spiritual Jew than a superbly observant one. I pick and choose what resonates with me and for this Passover, I’ve decided to observe the logical version of Passover. I am skipping on the grains that I feel ancient Jews actually had access to: wheat, oats, barley and rice. Yes, there is an off chance Jews would have access to rice that comes from Asia. However, usefully for myself, I am allowing corn! Because corn comes from Americas and I feel that even with the Mediterranean Sea access chances are Jews did not eat corn! And these days you can’t escape the lure of corn. It’s everywhere, even down to the ice cream that I allowed myself to eat. Corn syrup, HFCS is everywhere people and you know what, you have to make do. Below is my breakfast: kosher for my Pesach-yogurt, banana, orange juice and macaroons! And eggs were on the stove!
Filed under Personal Reflections
Just started a non-blog related book but the quote in it captured my romantic heart so much I had to share.
Here’s my contribution to Thursday Quotables hosted by my lovely friend Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies.
Jeremiah has made a heart at Flat Creek and a star at Herkimer. But in the Nebraska Territory he has written, I dhall always be near to you.”
Filed under Personal Reflections
On a lovely Saturday morning with a purring cat next to me and a sleeping partner in another room, I have a few moments to myself. Last night I lit Shabbat candles for the first time in months. When I first moved to this house to share my life with this man and this cat, I didn’t really know what to expect. But in my single life I had gotten into lighting shabbat candles. I am not a particularly practicing person. I observe some fasts, I follow certain as self chosen food restrictions, I light Hanukkah candles but I do not go to temple. I guess working for a Jewish organization is enough? Nah, that’s not it. To be truthful, I never felt like I belonged in it. I always knew I was a Jew but the ritual aspects of it were not part of my life until early 90s when Ukraine was finally free to welcome the Jewish missionaries (yep, you know it happened). Its not that it didn’t feel authentic to me, but in the end the service experience, the having to be with other people couldn’t withstand against my shyness and slight skepticism.
So I didn’t become a temple Jew. Instead for a long time I did nothing. In college, a beer drinking Chabad rabbi bet me he’d win a game of pool at a Jewish frat party and if so, I would have to start lighting candles. By then it wasn’t my first rodeo as far as hey, be a better Jew and do this. So I laughed and said, sure I’d like to see that happen. Of course just to spite my universe, he won. So here is when my spiritual return to Judaism begins…..or not. I did start lighting candles and have been doing so on and off since that fateful pool game.
In the end, the candles underline my adult choices on how to follow my spiritual Judaism (I consider myself an ethnic Jew for those that would argue Judaism is merely a religion). I continue to pick and choose what speaks to me. For the last year, I was too busy and stressed out to hear the call of Shabbat though I continued to follow the resting principles with my partner ( who is not religious though has some middle eastern in his genetic profile – so much for a goy I always wanted 😉 ). But last night I heard them through the noise and we lit them together, like we lit Hanukah candles together in December.
So here is to heeding the call of what calls to you.
From the fingertips of Eugenia S
Filed under Personal Reflections
This comes a bit late in the night but it’s still Tuesday so here is a slice of my childhood courtesy of yet another wonderful list hosted by Broke & Bookish!
So without further adieu, here are my tens!
1. Doroga uhodit v dal by Alexandra Brushteyn.
This is the first literary love of mine. My mom read it in the 60s and she had to share it with me. It tells the story (in Russian and sadly not translated) of a Jewish girl growing up in czarist Russia.
2. Jane Eyre by the one and only Charlotte Bronte.
The BBC version is my favorite film version’s come
3. Angelica series by Anne & Serge Golon.
Sexy French Louis XIV era romance at its best
4. Edgar R Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes. YEEEEEAP.
5. H Rider Haggard King Solomon’s Mines – shades of Indiana Jones
6. Thousand and One Nights aka Arabian Nights
7. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I was a weird kid. Yes I read it when I was still a kid.
8. Actually didn’t read this particular book but I love the color and I can’t remember the Russian version’s name!
9. Children of Captain Grant by Jules Verne.
Superbly famous miniseries was made of this when I was a kid. The book is about kids of the sea captain marooned on an island and their quest to come home.
10. And finally! Roxelana by Pavlo Zagrebelniy.
The story of the first legal wife of an Ottoman sultan – Roxelana or Hurrem.
Hope you enjoyed these! I certainly enjoyed the trip down the memory lane~
From the fingertips of Eugenia S
Filed under MEMES, Personal Reflections
Hey guys,
I am a bit mad at myself right now. So perhaps I overreached a bit thinking I could do both a book and a movie review in short order. I’ve finished the book and yet again I surprised myself because on my now third read-through, I actually enjoyed it greatly. The first two times I thought it was pretty weird. But I still haven’t had time to watch the movie, and I’ll be honest, the movie was always my first love. So no go on the review yet because I really desperately want to do two-in-one even though it will be hard. In the mean time feast your eyes on the field of sunflowers from the movie. They look authentic or at least CGI authentic since I honestly can’t tell if they are real or not. My fondest childhood memories of Ukraine always involve fields of sunflowers in the summer. Dad would drive the car to a lake or a river where everyone would have a picnic and swim, and then on the way home, we would always drive by sunflower fields (in fact I have a very strong memory of running up the hill from where we picnicked to grab them and smell them) and stop to collect a few so that mom would roast the sunflowers at home until blackened and we would snack on them for ages.
This is closest to what they looked like in my memory. A lot of the houses in my hometown looked very much like this. It actually made me sad just now trying to find a lovely photo so that people could see what I meant because so many photos of Ukrainian sunflower fields on Google are coming up with images of the Ukrainian army or the separatists in Eastern Ukraine, or even worse with images of the downed flight last year in a field of sunflowers. So instead I am going to hold onto the image above to give you an idea of what my childhood really looked like. And hopefully it will be enough until I can watch the movie and amaze you (probably not) with my superb observations.
Filed under Personal Reflections
attempts to recover my lost multisyllabic gumption
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